Firefox 3.1 delayed - new beta on the way

Mozilla announced Firefox 3.1 has been delayed to the second quarter of this year or later, mainly due to many bugs in TraceMonkey. The third beta version of Firefox 3.1 will be released this week, and a fourth beta is expected by mid-April.

The decision was not unexpected. Last weekend, Shaver said that bugs in TraceMonkey had slowed the development pace, which in turn had kicked the browser's release into next quarter . He also said that developers were considering a fourth beta.

Shaver's decision to push out Beta 3, come hell or high water, followed comments by a few Mozilla developers who wondered whether it's smart to hold up Firefox for TraceMonkey fixes. One company programmer speculated that minus the new JavaScript engine, Mozilla could have wrapped up Firefox 3.1 by this point. "Without TraceMonkey, we probably could have shipped 3.1 final by now, or, if not now, within the next month," said Firefox developer David Baron last week .